I guided Lucy to a corner table between the bar and the door, away from everybody, then went back and got her a beer and myself a whiskey rocks. "You can't leave a military hospital in the middle of the night and expect no one to worry," she said when I came back.

"T thought Mom and Dad were overreacting,

but seeing you now, I'm not so sure."

"The Marines know where I am," I said. This wasn't exactly true, but I hadn't been officially declared AWOL.

"That's not what the Corps told Dad. He and Mom are freaking out."

Lucy didn't know the whole story, and I wasn't about to burden her with it. She was only two years older than me, but you'd think she was my mom. "How are they?"

"Worried about you," Lucy said, "but keeping busy." She looked down at her beer, caressing the lip of the glass. "Mom's been dragging Dad to every Shakespeare play at the Folger. Last week was The Tempest."

"Dad must fucking hate it."

"He's fine. Okay, he's not totally fine. He's drinking again."

She looked pointedly at the glass in my hand.

I glanced away. Her eyes always were a little too sharp.

"And how's he dealing with the new administration?" Dad was a moderate Republican senator from New York; his respect for Carter, shall we say, knew bounds. Vice President Rockefeller had been a mentor of his, and he'd adored President Ford. I didn't give a damn about any of this, but Lucy loved talking politics, and it got her out of my grille.

"He feels guilty, I think," Lucy said. "By coming out against Nixon so early, he worries he undermined Ford and set the stage for his defeat."

"How's work at the paper?" The previous summer, right out of Yale, Lucy had been hired as an intern at the national desk of the Washington Evening Star.

June 1977(6)